April 20, 2016

John Kasich, Not ‘Mr. Nice Guy” or Moderate – Part Two

New York’s primary is finished, and Donald Trump was declared the winner at 9:01 EST, one minute after the polls closed. With the predicted 25 percent of the New York vote, John Kasich has still won only one state, and he’s sensitive about it. Asked if he is qualified to be the nominee if he’s won only one state by the Cleveland convention, Kasich claims that “there’s not ‘if’ in there.” The reporter politely presses him for an answer, and Kasich grabs the voice recorder out of the recorder’s hand and snaps, “What do you think?” The reporter calmly answers, “I think you should answer the question.” The video of the exchange is here.

Considering Kasich’s policies about women and blacks, it’s amazing that any of them vote for him. Three years ago, Kasich could have continued a federal waiver to not reinstate work requirements for the poor that would provide jobs so that they would keep welfare benefits. He kept the waiver in 16 of 88 counties—the rural areas with white populations that largely voted for him. The poor in the remaining 72 counties, including eight counties that hold 75 percent of black residents, lost their wavers. As soon as waiver expired, 134,000 people showed up at the food pantries.

In another policy change, Kasich cut the Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies program that provides in-home visits to poor women throughout their pregnancies and for the first two years after they give birth. Ohio ranks 45th nationally in infant mortality rate and has one of the highest rates of infant deaths for black mothers in the country. In the most recent GOP debate, Chuck Todd asked Kasich about Cleveland being one of the most segregated cities in the country, Ohio being the sixth worst state in which to raise a black child, and the $20,000 income gap between black and white families. Kasich said he didn’t know about these statistics but did respond to the issue of infant mortality. According to Kasich, the white community is doing much better, and “the [black] community itself is going to have to have a better partnership with all of us to begin to solve that problem.”

Kasich’s defunding health programs offered by Planned Parenthood shows another lack of concern for infant mortality. By pulling money from PP, Kasich has increased unplanned pregnancies and domestic violence, two causes of infant mortality, and decreases prenatal care. The 65 percent of his state’s population opposed to defunding Planned Parenthood didn’t stop Kasich from eliminating health care for thousands of residents. Most of the $1.3 million that Kasich denied Planned Parenthood in Ohio comes from the federal government.

Ohio is known throughout the nation for unchecked police brutality. Tamir Rice was killed in Cleveland, John Crawford III near Dayton, and Sam Dubose in Cincinnati.

In the area of women’s reproductive rights, Ohio is a horror story. Last June, Cosmopolitan magazine ran the article “How Ohio Became One of the Worst States for Reproductive Rights in the Country,” and that’s hard to do in the United States! The state has a gag order on rape crisis counselors mentioning abortion, a “heartbeat bill” banning abortions after 20 weeks, a forced waiting period and counseling before an abortion giving alternatives to abortion, a “medical emergency” law to delay abortions even if a woman may die from continuing the pregnancy, and mandated court approval for minors getting abortions if they lack parental consent. Among Kasich’s 17 anti-abortion measures are banning abortions from public hospitals and drastically reducing the number of women’s clinics. Kasich funded so-called “crisis pregnancy centers,” fake health clinics that provide false information about abortions such as it causes cancer, instead of real women’s clinics.

In 2012, Kasich appointed former Ohio Right to Life Executive Director Michael Gonidakis to the state medical board. Gonidakis admitted that he wanted the position to further his anti-choice, anti-woman agenda, including denying transfer agreements from abortion clinics to public hospitals. Clinics that perform abortions must look to privately funded hospitals which tend to be Catholic or otherwise Christian and will not sign transfer agreements. By late last year, over half of these clinics were forced to close. Kasich’s laws forced one woman to drive 300 miles to deliver her stillborn child because no doctors would perform an abortion on the woman at 22 weeks.

In addition to taking reproductive rights from women, Kasich consistently makes offensive sexist remarks. In Fairfax (VA), he praised women for their bravery in leaving their kitchens to help elect him. One woman responded, “I’ll come out to support you, but I won’t be coming out of the kitchen.” (One could ask why she would vote for him!) Later he gave the standard non-apology, saying he’s “more than happy to say, ‘I’m sorry’ if I offended somebody out there.” He finished by saying, “Everybody’s just got to relax.”

At the same meeting, a young nursing student asked, “Could you please tell me the economic and public health benefit of defunding an organization that has treated of four million people for STD services just in the past year?” He began by falsely claiming that Planned Parenthood had “discredited itself,” ignoring the “discredited” videos, the indicted leaders of the scam, and the absolution of any PP wrongdoing from Ohio’s Harris County grand jury. The bill defunding PP denies services like cancer screenings to over 50,000 Ohio women. Kasich’s segue went to his claim of having “robust women’s health funding in Ohio” which led to the disastrous topic of high infant mortality.

Kasich not only thinks that his supporters had to come out of the kitchen to work for him but also believes that wives of politicians are “at home doing the laundry.” He made this comment while trying to give thanks for GOP candidates’ spouses, such as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s wives, and added that they are “at home taking care of the kids.”

Last November he asked a woman in Iowa, “Have you ever been on a diet?” He was trying to compare budgets to diets, but the use of the metaphor fell flat. When student paper columnist Kayla Solsbak at the University of Richmond raised her hand, he said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have any Taylor Swift concert tickets.” He didn’t even ask her what she wanted. Later she explained in her article that she went to see Kasich “because it’s my civic duty to be an informed voter. Please start treating me like one.”

Asked about the gender pay gap, Kasich responded to a woman, “Do you not have the skills to be able to compete?” Addressing spousal rape referenced in a disposition by Donald Trump’s ex-wife, Ivana Trump, he said that “everyone should simply “move on. Talk about something else.” During a campaign event last week, a young woman, asked about Social Security. Kasich inquired, “Did somebody tell you to ask this question?” She said, “No. I think for myself.”

In what might be his most shocking example of misogyny, Kasich addressed a question about what he would do about the high rate of sexual assault on college campuses. He told the female questioner not to “go to parties where there’s a lot of alcohol.” He follows the conservative philosophy that assault victims are to blame for the crime, and the perpetrators have no responsibility. This attitude shows how he would govern if elected president.

Kasich’s tax plan decreases taxes for the wealthy by one-third and eliminates the estate on wealthiest 0.2 percent of taxpayers, lowing $246 billion in the next decade. He also wants to lower the tax rate on investments to 15 percent rather than reducing tax rates for wages. Seventy percent of the taxes saved in investments would go to the top 1 percent while the bottom 80 percent would get seven percent. Kasich also wants corporate taxes to be decreased by almost one-third.

Kasich wants to freeze all non-defense discretionary spending for eight years while boosting military spending by 17 percent. His solution to education, transportation, and job training is block grants which greatly reduce these. Winners: wealthy people, corporations, and military. Losers: veterans, students, disabled, poor, women, people suffering from disasters because of much less money for food, housing, education, health, job training—anything that provides opportunity and security for working families.

John Kasich doesn’t have the delegates going into the GOP convention, but he knows how much the Republican establishment hates Trump Cruz. His expectation is that all the delegates will rally around him by the second or third vote of the convention. Stranger things have happened.